Peace Now

Was the Good War a bad thing?

Nicholson Baker is a little bit of a Martian, and this is what gives his books their curious appeal. He locks in on his material from odd angles. Even when the subject is sexual fantasy, as it is in “Vox” and “The Fermata,” an area of human life in which there is no norm, he doesn’t seem quite normal. He has the imaginative habits of an obsessive-compulsive. Fortunately (or consequently), he is also a gifted writer.

He likes to surprise, though, and one surprise in his new book (not the biggest surprise) is that it is all done in flat, newspaper prose. The sacrifice of brilliance and preciosity appears to be a proof of the seriousness of the book’s purpose. “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” (Simon & Schuster; $30) is a work of nonfiction, composed of short, dated, factual items, many of them less than a page long, concerning people and events in the decades leading up to the Second World War. (The last entry is from December 31, 1941, the month the United States entered the war.) The items have been collected from newspapers, memoirs, diaries, official documents, and the historical literature; there are ninety pages of scholarly end matter. The presentation is all data, no distillation, but the intention is plainly stated in a brief afterword, in which Baker says that he undertook the book to answer two questions: Was the Second World War a good war? Did fighting it help anyone who needed help? His conclusions are no and no, and his heroes, he says, are the pacifists and humanitarians who opposed a military response to the threat posed by the Fascist powers: “They failed, but they were right.”

You can rig up a moral-equivalence argument for any violent conflict. In the case of a “total war,” like the Second World War—a war in which civilian populations are among the targets of military action—there is sure to be plenty of atrocity on both sides. Did the Allies take actions that made war more likely, and raised its human cost? An indictment would include the following particulars: the American oil embargo against Japan; the prewar sale of planes and other armaments to future belligerents on both sides; the provocative (to Japan) concentration of American naval resources at Pearl Harbor; the firebombing of German and Japanese cities by Britain and the United States; the imposition of blockades to prevent the importation of food and medical supplies to Germany; the refusal of the United States (and almost every other nation involved) to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees; the internment of ethnic Germans in Britain (and, later on, ethnic Japanese in the United States); the suppression of antiwar opinion; the development of chemical and nuclear weapons; and the bellicose rhetoric of Winston Churchill. These constitute the main themes in Baker’s account. (He includes plenty of examples of Fascist brutality as well, though often for the purpose of showing how Nazi-like some of the Allies’ statements and actions were.)

The Allied countries were world powers for a reason. They did not rise to dominance by disdaining the use or the threat of force. They were not paragons of social justice, either. Britain was an imperial nation with a long history of repressive violence in its colonies. The United States was a major arms exporter that operated a de-facto, in many regions de-jure, system of racial apartheid. France’s quick capitulation to the Nazi occupation—the “strange defeat” of 1940—and the French collaboration in the deportation of Jews were acts of a nation whose own experiment with liberal democracy, the Third Republic, had been troubled. About Stalin’s Soviet Union nothing needs to be said. These were the imperfect states that history produced to oppose a genocidal, imperialistic totalitarianism.

Why did these states resort to violence? Isn’t the obvious answer “Because appeasement had failed”? For six years, the world stood by while Hitler re-armed Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty; murdered his political opponents; legalized the persecution of Jews; and began annexing his neighbors. Plenty of people tried to bargain with Hitler, and he made fools of them all. In 1933, the parties of war were a minority in Britain and the United States; it is not surprising that by the end of 1941 they were the parties in charge. There may have been more intelligent efforts to prevent a war than those which were attempted, but it is hard to imagine that nonviolent resistance was ever a serious option. Baker quotes Mahatma Gandhi, responding to an article in the New York Jewish Frontier, in 1939, which had suggested that if Gandhi were a Jew in Germany he would last about five minutes. “That will not disprove my case,” he said. “I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators. . . . Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime.” It was an expensive political philosophy, as events soon showed.

Each of Baker’s themes is a legitimate matter of debate, and all have been debated many times. W. G. Sebald’s account of the destruction of German cities by Allied bombing, for example, in “On the Natural History of Destruction,” published in English in 2003, was a brave and controversial challenge to conventional beliefs about the war against Hitler; some readers felt that it was unbalanced, some that it was necessary. It is good to have these arguments. Baker’s book is eccentric because it paints a dozen mostly unrelated phenomena with a single moral brush. It is true that the United States and other anti-Fascist nations should have assisted European Jews fleeing from Hitler, and they did not. It does not follow that those countries had no moral standing to oppose the Nazis. Churchill was a late-Victorian sabre-rattler and Roosevelt seems to have once made a prejudicial comment about Jews. This did not disqualify them from leading their nations in a war against Hitler and Mussolini.

You feel that Baker cannot have wondered whether the Second World War was worth fighting, and then searched through the record. He seems to have decided that no war is worth fighting and then picked the most justifiable war he could find to try to make his case. That case is made by stringing together material paraphrased from news clips and anecdotes, offered in a bald, just-the-facts manner—bombs drop, civilians die, Churchill sips a glass of port.

It’s an interesting experiment: Baker is trying to eliminate the historian’s interpretive gloss in the interests of respecting the rawness of the primary experience. He seems to think that the facts speak for themselves. But facts never speak for themselves. We speak for them. The historian’s gloss matters (not to mention all the facts that are left out): it provides the reader with intellectual traction, an ability to weigh the claims being put forward to justify the selection of facts. Baker’s presentation may seem empirical—these things happened, you can look them up, no varnish has been applied—but the effect is entirely emotional, because there is no nesting argument, no narrative, to give events a context. It’s a tabloid technique: a six-word quotation or a single image is all you need to understand any issue. The pretense of no manipulation is completely manipulative. One would not want to say that “Human Smoke” reproduces the rhetorical strategy that Baker deplores when he sees it used to generate a public frenzy for war. That would be a tendentious exercise in moral equivalence. So I won’t say it. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.